Engineering design using decision analysis

This paper relates the top-down, iterative design process of systems engineering to key elements of decision analysis to show how decision analysis concepts can be used to enhance decision making by systems engineers. We begin by reviewing the systems engineering process: requirements, operational concept, system boundaries, and functional, physical and operational architectures. We then discuss requirements as objectives and constraints. Next, we introduce the decision analysis concepts of fundamental objectives and the fundamental objectives hierarchy. These ideas are related to the traditional concepts of measures of effectiveness (MOEs) and measures of performance (MOPs). We then describe influence diagrams and show how the choice of operational architectures and the associated requirements allocation can be addressed with influence diagrams. We discuss how the fundamental objectives and objectives hierarchy change as the iterative design process proceeds to greater and greater detail